Tuesday, May 06, 2008, 16:54

Beta testers required

Righto, I think the new version is ready to go beta! There's no SQL DB support as yet, I'm still working on that but I'd appreciate any of you loyal users volunteering to beta test the new version.

Send me email via the CONTACT page if you are interested.

As a little teaser, here's a screenshot of the new interface.

http://www.imagehosting.com/out.php/i1737580_ManagePC2.5.JPG

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Thursday, May 01, 2008, 19:50

Maybe next week?

I may be in a position to release a beta of v2.5 next week. It will probably be without SQL server support (unless that proves very easy to code). I just need to get the alternate WMI credentials working properly (again!) and also make sure there are no bugs with the new code.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 07:32

Slowly but surely

Reporting is done. You will now be able to export the data to HTML and RTF files. I plan to work on the Excel export today.

I realised today that most of the important code has been entirely re-written. It also made me realise how many mistakes I made in the previous version(s). Even though it worked and was pretty stable there were things I was doing which were, well, less than optimal. That's been corrected now and I'm suprised at the difference it's made. The whole application just feels smoother and more performant. Amazing what happens when you bother to find out about proper object-oriented techniques and methods!!

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Thursday, April 24, 2008, 21:10

Major milestone!

Today I completed the migration of all the features of the previous version to v2.5. Now it's a matter of adding the extra stuff that I would like to do (SQL database support and reporting are the main ones).

There are a couple of major changes that you should be aware of. Firstly, information is now retrieved on a "when requested" basis. This means that when you select a machine, it will go and get some basic summary information. Then, when you select, say, the "Services" tab it will go and get the installed Services. There will be an option to perform a full scan by default it you want to though.

The second major change is to the XML file format. This is perhaps the one that may affect more people as I know some of you import the XML files into Access/SQL. In v2.41 I created the XML file "manually". By that I mean I wrote specific code to add XML nodes, child nodes, attributes etc. Whilst this worked well enough it made it quite difficult if I ever wanted to add new WMI queries (as I have done with v2.5)

Now, I use the ability of .NET to automatically generate XML files from datasets. This means that the format of the XML file has radically changed. Also, because of the way I've had to write the code, there is no longer one single XML file for all machines. Each machine will have its own XML file.

Anyway, that's a quick status update. I hope to get SQL database support done next and then it's on to the more onerous task of being able to generate reports. This may or may not make it into the next release ;)

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008, 11:50

Things are progressing

Work's going quite a bit faster than I thought it would. The new interface is done and all of the WMI queries are populating the tabs.

Now it's just a matter of the little stuff. Getting the buttons, context menus, remote process execution, scheduled task creation, XML export etc etc into the new version. Then I will start looking at the new features (reporting, export to SQL server).

Watch this space

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